Follow Us

Aaron Posner on adapting Chekhov: ‘I have no desire to serve, but to borrow’

The playwright's latest adaptation is 'Life Sucks,' playing at Custom Made Theatre

Lily JaniakMay 6, 2019Updated: May 8, 2019, 9:26 am

Jensen Power and Gabriel Montoya in Custom Made Theatre Company’s “Life Sucks.” Photo: Jay Yamada, Custom Made Theatre Company

No one in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” ever quite says, “life sucks” — the title of Aaron Posner’s “sort of” adaptation of the classic — but you can find an equivalent on almost every page of the original: “Over all, a picture of gradual and indisputable decline.” “I’m dying of boredom.” “In any of life’s dramas … I’ve only had a walk-on part.”

The update, now in a Custom Made Theatre Company Bay Area premiere, doesn’t only find contemporary analogues for Chekhov’s impotent, thwarted Russian gentry, each of them incapacitated by a broken ideal or unrequited love. “Life Sucks” also seeks to make text of subtext, to bring to the surface impulses and desires and shades of meaning that go unspoken in the 1898 play.

Chekhov’s Sonia can read as doormat; Posner’s Sonia (Jensen Power) gets to be graphic about her lust and forthright about how she sees herself as having no needs. Chekhov’s Yelena bats a slew of suitors away with a kind of elegant exasperation; Posner’s Ella gets to cut to the quick: “I’ve given you some time to gather your addled and surprised wits. So enlighten me. What are you like inside? What is going on in there that is so different that you want me to know?”

It’s when “Life Sucks” expands farthest from the Chekhov that Brian Katz’s production, which opened Sunday, May 5, most succeeds. (Especially at the beginning of the play, his cast members can seem blocked from connecting — with each other, with the audience — as if constrained by invisible force fields. Katz also makes the queasy casting choice of having the show’s one black actor, Brittany Sims, play a character who keeps saying dimwitted things to the others’ derision, which grates, even as Sims makes both poignant and comic choices in the role.)

The Chronicle caught up with Posner, who has also adapted Chekhov’s “The Seagull” into “Stupid F—ing Bird” and Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” into “District Merchants,” to talk about the playwright’s tactics in taking on these projects. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: I felt like I got a little more about every character from “Life Sucks” than I did from Chekhov.

A: I’m more generous than he is.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: He was far, far more brilliant and an incredible, genius innovator and a transformer of all performance ever since. But he’s an iceberg writer, in that so much of the character and personality and even conflict is below the surface. And I take a lot of what’s below the surface, and I hurl it up on the surface. It’s a lot more overt, as opposed to covert.

Playwright Aaron Posner Photo: Courtesy Aaron Posner

Q: I was going back through the original, and I felt like I saw all of your characterizations there, but they just don’t quite come out into the open — do you know what I mean?

A: I’m not going to say that I saw all of that there (in the Chekhov). I’m not saying it’s not there; I think it’s a possible explanation. … I stole his playground and borrowed it for my own purposes. Then I didn’t think about him a lot. The fact that so many people have written about how true I am to Chekhov … has always surprised me, because it was never really my intention.

I love the complicated, twisty, broken human situations that he sets up, and then I have filled those in much more with my own observations and my own worrying about the world. “Life Sucks” is not my attempt to excavate “Uncle Vanya,” but rather my attempt to create a variation on a theme — or a reimagined, re-engineered version that speaks more to myself and my friends, my loved ones and I hope the world today than Chekhov necessarily does.

Chekhov leaves a tremendous amount in subtext. I didn’t worry if I was trying to get Chekhov’s subtext right. I was just imagining one set of possibilities in this particular version, just as another playwright could have done the exact same exercise … taken the exact same characters, the exact same structure, written another play that would have also felt true to Chekhov, yet all the particulars of the characters would have felt very, very different.

A: Because he’s dealing with core human concerns, the quotidian difficulties of life: “The person I want doesn’t love me as I would like him to.” “I don’t know how to deal with my family.” “I haven’t achieved my dreams.” More or less (Chekhov’s) people are normal people like most of us — pretty great and pretty flawed, trying to do the best they can, and failing a great deal of the time.

Q: You call the play a “sort of” adaptation and refer in your own script to Chekhov’s “superior” play. Why the caveats?

A: I began by doing what I now call my reverent adaptations. When I was adapting Chaim Potok and Ken Kesey and Steve Lopez and Kaye Gibbons, I was reading novels and then trying to do my best to share that person’s vision of the story. … Whether I was working with the author or not, I wanted it to be something they would recognize and respect and say, “That’s my world.” I was more of a midwife. … With the Chekhov, I haven’t cared at all whether I’m serving Chekhov. On the contrary, I have been irreverent on purpose and have had no desire to serve but rather to borrow, appropriate and to mess around with. But I will say this, on a more serious note: I have tried in every way in these plays to tell the truth the best that I am able.